The 28-year-old, who cut her showbiz teeth as Serena on Gossip Girl has hit plenty of milestones in the past few years, including the birth of her daughter James Reynolds with her husband Ryan Reynolds.

Blake told writer Mickey Rapkin that motherhood hasn’t felt like a huge transformation for her. ‘When women become mothers, it’s all: “How’s your style?”, “Do you dress differently?”, “Do you go to Mommy & Me classes?”’ she told us, ‘I wanted to go to a Mommy & Me class before I was a mom. People really expect that you’re suddenly a different woman, and I think it strips a woman’s identity in a way that is kind of strange, because I’ve always been innately maternal my whole life.’

Blake is making a busy return to Hollywood this year, firstly in Jaume Collet-Serra’s shark thriller The Shallows (which is being touted as the scariest Great White film since Jaws), then in Woody Allen’s Cafe Society. ‘I’m always ambitious about film-making’ she said, ‘but I love my personal life so much – and my family so much – that it takes a lot to make me want to leave the house. Most of the things I do, I fight for. But to want to fight for something? I have to be really stimulated by it.’

She’s also explained why we won’t see her relocating to LA any time soon. ‘My husband and I chose a profession and a side effect of that is your personal life is public. Our child hasn’t had the opportunity to choose whether or not she wants her personal life to be public or not. So in order to give her as much normality as possible, we want her to have a childhood like we had. So we can’t really throw her into the lion’s den that is LA, not that we really want to.’
Read the full interview in the August issue of Marie Claire, out now.

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